THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 12-01-02: MOMENT; Irrational Exuberance

When readers opened the June 2002 issue of Wallpaper magazine, they found a baffling surprise. It wasn't the discussions of $500 dominos, personal submarines or ''two-roomed goldfish bowls.'' It was the editor's letter. Written, as always, by Tyler Brûlé, it ended on an uncharacteristically melancholy note: ''As for me, gentle readers, little more to say than thank you and adieu.'' The man who had run the magazine since it was founded six years before, who had used it to define and propagate a new aesthetic so thoroughly branded that it was known only by the magazine's name, was stepping down. It was the end of an era.

Or to put it more precisely, it was the end of a vanishingly brief moment in consumer history. But through the combination of the style world's insular obsession with trends and the magazine's own self-mythologization, that brief moment had come to seem, to Wallpaper's devoted readers, like the dawning of a new age in design. The look of the magazine, the tone of its articles, the subjects of its fascination and the precision of its demographic target had all been perfectly in tune with the cultural mood of the times. Without Brûlé, supporters and detractors alike wondered, could the magazine survive? More important, could those times?

Brûlé, now 34, got his start in television, working first for the BBC, then eventually as a London bureau chief for Fox television. Quick-witted, charismatic and attractive, he was swiftly picked up by the fashion pack and was soon writing style features for The Sunday Times, The Observer and Vanity Fair. But he was easily bored and began accepting reporting assignments in the Middle East and other trouble zones. In Afghanistan, Brûlé was injured by sniper fire and subsequently repatriated to England, where he was hospitalized for a month. As the urban(e) myth has it, while reading magazines and reflecting on the meaning of life, the universe and Verner Panton plastic chairs, Brûlé had something of an epiphany. ''I realized you got one shot at life,'' he said, ''and there was no magazine out there that was telling me about things that were suddenly very important in life -- home, food, drink and seeing the world.''

When he recovered, he gathered a small team of creative acolytes and put together a photocopied mock-up to show to advertisers and publishers. ''At that time, I thought of Tyler as my cute, clever, funny friend,'' remembers Alice Rawsthorn, director of London's Design Museum. ''But I was blown away when he showed me the dummy of the magazine. It was astoundingly concise and clear.''

This clear, concise concept entailed a rigid code of interior comportment for a new generation of young urban professionals, a group that wanted to avoid broad-shouldered 80's excess without actually giving up the habit of conspicuous consumption. It was a particularly easy sell in London, which during the mid-90's was entering a period of extreme design obsession. Magazines like the avant-garde Blueprint and atypically cool Elle Decoration were talking up a savvy interior-style sector. Edgy furniture manufacturers like Sheridan Coakley's SCP were putting the prototypes of rising talents like Jasper Morrison, Tom Dixon, Konstantin Grcic and Terence Woodgate into production. And the phrase ''designer restaurant'' was being used to designate any one of the hundreds of places where the young and beautiful could see and be seen in an environment worthy of their wardrobes.

Happily for Brûlé, who was born and raised in Canada, the sometimes insular gaze of European fashion was simultaneously beginning to look across the ocean. Tom Ford, the American designer who had recently been installed as the creative director of Gucci, was hanging out in London and building an empire with clothes inspired by his passion for the cool California modernism of Richard Neutra, Albert Frey and Charles and Ray Eames. Ford even went so far as to design a dress based on an iconic white fiberglass Eames chair with a peek-a-boo orifice cut into the back. (On Ford's dress, the gape came in front, providing an enticing glimpse of tanned hip.)

Luxury brands like Gucci, Armani, MaxMara and Patrick Cox (the Wannabe shoe designer, who was Brûlé's boyfriend at the time) immediately saw the appeal of Brûlé's vision and signed on to advertise. An Austrian investor agreed to back the magazine, to be published by North South. And so, using a laptop in his apartment, Brûlé and his tiny staff brought out the first issue of Wallpaper -- subtitled ''The Stuff That Surrounds You'' -- in September 1996. The cover featured a neatly groomed model wearing Tom Ford's white jersey dress and a slouching, bare-midriffed male companion lounging on white wicker furniture. ''The way we live now,'' Brûlé said at the time, ''is not about having a beautiful fashion moment, then a beautiful food moment, then a beautiful travel moment, then a beautiful moment wearing a Helmut Lang shirt. It's about having all these rolled into one.''

Piecing together its aesthetic lexicon from morsels of Bauhaus rigor and midcentury formalism, with a dash of 60's Op Art and 70's shag-pile thrown in for fun, Wallpaper created a hermetically sealed, self-referential world that spun endlessly, glossily around on itself. It wasn't just about furniture, or fashion, or travel. It was about an oddly compelling future view in which Djibouti and S-o Paulo and Helsinki were equally plausible, equally accessible locales in which to conduct the fundamental human drama of being stylish. This was a kind of globalism far removed from the barricades or the boardrooms: a mix of cheery apolitical acquisitiveness and fashionably jaded ennui, in which all prices were listed in local currency and all travel was conducted in business class.

At first glance stimulating, at second glance clearly simulating, the magazine's essential aura of insubstantiality was underscored by the fact that most of the rooms on display in Wallpaper's décor pages were not the actual (if unattainable) domestic spaces of other high-end shelter books; they were deliberately unconvincing studio sets that could be snapped together anywhere you wanted: a set of fake walls and some artfully arranged $6,000 hard plastic sofas. Onto these uncomfortable items were draped an array of waxy, vacant-eyed models, themselves draped in this or that designer's couture. In their static approximation of ''good times'' by the pool or in the playroom or the kitchen, these Stepford kids came across as bloodless, desireless, despite the spare-nothing lifestyle at their manicured fingertips and their implied ambisexual antics. Immaculate in their plasticity, they bordered on the posthuman.

The magazine's oracular pronouncements were equally, utterly deadpan. ''The bathroom should feel like a spa from a brilliant Asian hotel,'' the pages instructed. Or, ''Wallpaper is a strong advocate of residential addresses in W1.''

Brûlé called the whole thing ''an exercise in optimism.'' Others called it ''yuppie porn.'' Like it or hate it, though, Wallpaper under Brûlé's reign -- unashamedly aspirational, obsessively stylish, flamboyantly free of care -- captured all the frenzied vacuity of end-of-millennium life.

But it soon became clear that Wallpaper couldn't get the word out all on its own. ''Originally,'' Brûlé confesses, ''I thought that besides the U.K., we might sell a few copies in Sydney, Toronto, New York or L.A., and that would be it. But by the fourth issue, the newsstand data suggested that the magazine was very influential. And we got a lot of press. And we weren't doing that great in the U.K. after all. And I thought that if this is going to really fly, and it was going to have more clout internationally, then we needed a proper international partner.''

''Basically, Tyler set the magazine up in order to quickly sell it,'' a collaborator on the first issue says. ''In those days, his major aim in life was to travel business class.'' Within the year he had upgraded to first class, with Time Inc.'s purchase of Wallpaper for $1.63 million. The question on everyone's lips at the time was, Why? A tightly niche-marketed title selling only 48,000 copies worldwide would normally fly way beneath the radar of that media behemoth. ''They wouldn't have bothered if they were out to sell a million copies,'' Brûlé admits. ''They wanted to access a whole different category of advertiser. To launch something that would grab a lot of attention but wouldn't be a huge out-of-pocket spend.''

The collaboration worked. Backed by a parent company of such magnitude, Wallpaper became a force to be reckoned with. Its sales never exceeded 150,000 worldwide, but it was stuffed full of glossy high-end advertising (bloating some issues out to 300 pages), and it exerted an influence way beyond its readership. Even people who had never bought a copy knew how to identify the aesthetic -- the austere minimalism of a white-on-white room, the deliberate monotony of some stodgy party game, a quick shopping jaunt to war-ravaged Beirut -- as ''very Wallpaper.'' The magazine was succeeding on several different fronts: holding up a campy mirror to late-90's consumerism while becoming a must-have object itself (what Noguchi coffee table would be complete without it?), increasing revenues and catapulting its editor into the heights of design-world prominence.

Despite Wallpaper's high profile, or quite likely as a result of it, the magazine began arousing the resentment of the design world's taste makers and gossips. ''It was a victim of its own success,'' reckons Marcus Field, then the editor of Blueprint. ''Designers started standing back from it.''

''Only a churl would deny the diligence and professionalism, even the fanaticism, that went into publishing Wallpaper, at least in the early days,'' says the English design critic Stephen Bayley. ''But the effect I got when I read it was more exhausting than stimulating. There was something about its relentlessness, its faddishness, its restless neophilia, its knowing smartness that was, to be frank, repulsive. Design is about the ordinary thing done extraordinarily well. Wallpaper was about meretricious exclusivity, temporary novelty and isolated privilege. Someone once said that fashion is buying things you don't need with money you don't have to impress people you don't like. Wallpaper was a fashion magazine.''

Of course, it was impossible to criticize Wallpaper without criticizing Brûlé personally. He had seen to that himself. ''There is very little disconnect between my life and the pages of the magazine,'' he said soon after Wallpaper came out. ''Let's face it,'' he told me later, ''the magazine pretty much reflects me and my life. It is so niche.'' Thus, as the magazine got bigger and more controversial, so did its editor. He was a regular fixture at the Ivy, a fashionable London eatery. He bought himself an island in the Stockholm archipelago. He became, as one associate puts it, ''not exactly unfamiliar with the interior of a private jet.'' He started behaving, by many accounts, like the AbFab cliché of a fashion magazine diva.

In July 2001, Time Inc. made its first major European acquisition, the British publishing giant IPC Media, which it bought for $1.6 billion. IPC's mass-market focus -- the group publishes Loaded, the notorious ''lad mag,'' along with anodyne titles like TV Times and Practical Boat Owner -- could hardly have had less in common with Wallpaper's insidery approach. Nevertheless, a decision was made to place Wallpaper under IPC's umbrella. It was ''a clash of cultures,'' Brûlé says. ''IPC had one way of doing things, and Wallpaper had another.'' Following press reports that his new overseers had begun questioning travel budgets, the amount of time he spent out of the office and expenses like Wallpaper's in-house chef, Brûlé signed his swan song and left.

During the high point of Wallpaper's success, advertisers had begun demanding ''added value'' from the magazine. ''All of a sudden,'' Brûlé recalls, ''we were getting a lot of calls from various clients having questions like, 'If we were going to open a store right now in Paris, which street should it be on?' or 'Do you think Barcelona or Madrid?' There comes a point where you say: We're just becoming pure consultants. And we should be getting paid for that.''

And that's how he came to open Wink Media. The company, which as a spinoff of Wallpaper was largely owned by Time Inc., had its first office in a janitor's closet at the magazine's offices. Today Wink is Brûlé's full-time obsession -- entirely distinct from Wallpaper, with meticulously hip offices just off Bond Street in London.

The agency's first client was Banana Republic; Stella McCartney, who was introducing her own clothing line, soon followed. Then Wink dusted off the dowdy image of Pringle, the Scottish knitwear label, and produced clean, crisp ads with a roster of Wallpaper-cute models. Wink also orchestrated the store design and corporate identity of Sheik Majed al-Sabah's $20 million Villa Moda emporium in Kuwait. And for Zimmerli, a Swiss underwear company, Wink proposed a whole new concept. ''This company makes the most amazing $50 to $60 briefs,'' Brûlé says. ''We took the classic Wink approach. We just went to them and said: 'You make the most amazing underwear. We think we can do your packaging, something that doesn't involve putting a boy with great abs and a girl with a pert bum on it.''' The alternative? ''A really fantastic white box.''

A really fantastic white box is just the kind of minimalist chic that defined Wallpaper, of course. But that was a publication wholly devoted to fantasy, to superficiality, to impracticality. Can the same sort of approach work for real companies -- particularly real companies operating in a severe economic downturn? Brûlé seems entirely untroubled by the distinction between designer escapism and bottom-line realities. ''We live in a Helvetica world,'' he says, referring to the spare, clean lines of the fashionable typeface. In his supersleek offices there's little to dispute the claim: 29 pale wood desks; 29 Artemide desk lights; 29 flat-screen Macs. There's no denying, it's very Wallpaper.

For the past 11 months, Wink has been applying Brûlé's style of ''optimism'' to Swissair. Not that anyone had asked Brûlé's opinion on the matter, but when the company suffered a financial collapse in October 2001, he wrote a big article in the Swiss newspaper Sonntags Zeitung outlining a 10-step recovery program. ''So many people said: 'What are you thinking? You're dispensing this information for free!' But about a week after that the C.E.O.-designate called.''

It was a somewhat personal matter. ''I had always been a big Swissair fan,'' Brûlé says. ''For me, it is a very romantic brand. One of the first times my parents came back to Canada -- it was from the 1976 Olympics at Innsbruck -- I remember seeing this 747 arrive at the Montreal airport with the white cross on the red background. It was just so cool.'' Brûlé won the account and has since undertaken a total redesign of the 133-plane fleet, from cutlery, seats, uniforms and blankets through to the carriage livery and logo, all the way up to the name, which is now simply ''Swiss.'' When the first made-over model takes to the skies early next summer, the interiors will be warm-toned -- ''cognac tan,'' as Brûlé puts it -- with matching seats and wine lists. The cabin crew will be in neat, stylish uniforms. Ultimately, the visual vocabulary is a mix of Lear-jet luxe and Corbusier's populist Pavillon Suisse. Wink dubbed it ''the Return of Civilized Aviation.''

As high-flying as this account may be, it's not quite the same as having your own large-format glossy in which to instruct almost 150,000 people how to eat, dress, play, live. Wallpaper is still being published, of course, and the understanding within the industry is that IPC will try to redirect it -- perhaps to reflect its new leadership, perhaps to reflect the new economic realities of a post-9/11 world. Although the new editor, Jeremy Langmead, came on board only last month, so his full influence won't be felt for some time, at The Evening Standard and The Sunday Times magazine, Style, he showed a nuanced eye for luxury goods and gorgeous lifestyles. But whatever new talents he brings to Wallpaper, the magazine has lost the campy triple-entendres of its founding editor, who ''actually didn't take himself, or the magazine, at face value,'' according to Marcus Field. ''Yes, Wallpaper was all fabulous and glamorous, but you could read it on several levels: the surface one, and then the one in which Tyler sent up the whole vapidness of consumer culture. At the same time, of course, reveling in it.''

So does Brûlé have any regrets about giving up his bully pulpit? ''The two entities -- Wallpaper and Wink -- while very complementary, were already growing apart anyway,'' he says. Besides, ''Wallpaper was perhaps not the same magazine everyone originally bought into. You can argue that it became,'' and here he hesitates, '' 'self-indulgent' is not the right word, but. . . . ''

Brûlé is currently involved in a final round of negotiations with Time Inc. to secure ownership of his agency. If all goes as planned, soon Wink and Brûlé will be completely removed from the Wallpaper that once surrounded them. The magazine did, in fact, survive. And as for the strange times that produced it? Since its inception, the booming economy has tanked, and the world has been driven to the brink of war. The design-obsessed trend-watchers of Djibouti, S-o Paulo or Helsinki may have tired of Scandinavian modern furniture, but there is no real evidence that they have abandoned the conspicuous pursuit of stylishness. For that to happen, after all, something really big would have to change.